


Finisterre, Sometimes

by sheffiesharpe



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 6000 Years of Slow Burn (Good Omens), Aziraphale walks on water, Bach on my bullshit, Cameos, Camino de Santiago, Canon-adjacent, Christopher Smart's Cat Jeoffry, First Time, Freckle Discourse, Genderfluid Crowley (Good Omens), M/M, Post-Canon, Snake Crowley (Good Omens), The Ineffable Plan (Good Omens), an ineffable game of Her own devising, mucking about in the American Revolution, the Milky Way is important
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-06 19:51:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20297035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheffiesharpe/pseuds/sheffiesharpe
Summary: It begins with a snake, and a garden, obviously.No, notthatbeginning, and not that snake, and not that garden, either, to be perfectly honest. This beginning, this link, this closed and independent little loop, begins in 1980, as we said, with a snake.[A little bit of punk rock, some interludes across the ages, and what happens immediately after the first day of the rest of their lives, which is something neither of them would ever expect.]





	Finisterre, Sometimes

**Author's Note:**

> Good Omens and all of the beautiful things made by this fandom have given me immense joy in a summer when I really needed it. I wanted to make something to give back, though it's been a long time since I've done any fandom writing. And because m'coll L celebrated with me the many joys of Freckle Discourse, and when Crowley said, "No more fascinating little restaurants where they know you," I knew there was something I could do with that.
> 
> With gratitude, friends.

It begins with a snake, and a garden, obviously.

No, not _that_ beginning, and not that snake, and not that garden, either, to be perfectly honest. The beginning in question, only one of many, is one of the more recent, one day in a series of delicate links—six thousand years of links, or orbits, so faithfully do they circle each other—that might have constituted a chain, leading to something, anchoring something, or to a constellation, were anyone so bold or impudent or innocent or utterly defiant enough to join each bright circling in anything more definite than ‘the Arrangement.’ But that will come, in time. This beginning, this link, this closed and independent little loop, begins in 1980, as we said, with a snake. 

***

Aziraphale shakes out his umbrella on the bookshop’s little stoop and contemplates, not for the first time, the pleasure of the words for the thing. Bumbershoot. Brolly. Parapluie. Paraguas. Umanga. Sateenvarjo. Payong. Parasol, for more clement weather, not so different from shading one’s eyes alone. Of course, there are sunglasses for that. No need for a parasol—not that he’s ever seen Crowley wield something so pedestrian as an umbrella. No, when it rains, Crowley stays in or stalks about with the water skimming neatly from the brim of his hat or turning his hair dark and sleek, dangerous and melancholy, which is, to Aziraphale’s mind, more than a touch Byronic. Which is, of course, redundant: Byron borrowed the motif from Crowley. Aziraphale is certain of it. All the same, no umbrellas for Crowley, which is perplexing, if one remembers the very first storm, the very first clouds and rain, which Aziraphale does. Daily, he remembers, and every time, he feels that feathered stretching in himself, the extension toward. But though Crowley had stood under a flustered angel’s outstretched wing all those years ago, he hasn’t, since the invention of the umbrella, deigned to share such a thing with said angel again. 

“Stubborn—” Aziraphale says, out loud, to himself or the umbrella in his hand or the lock on the door for which he never needed a key, and whatever the end of the phrase might have been, a diminutive hiss interrupts. 

“—and rude,” he’s about to say, to Crowley, for interrupting, but there’s no Crowley. There is, though, a small snake coiled behind the stone planter. It’s gathered into a tight knot, bridling at the umbrella tip and an angel’s shoe resting altogether too close, but slowly. It’s March. It can’t be more than 10C. A snake—especially not one so small—ought not be on a concrete stoop just now. Crowley complains when the bookshop temperature dips below 23. 

Habitual compassion wars with caution. Here, a cold and apparently quite vexed creature, but here also a snake out of season. Its small mouth snaps sluggishly when he bends closer. It doesn’t have the fangs he might expect from some infernal entity, but as well he knows, any good adversary has a few unexpected wiles. 

“Just a moment,” he says to the snake and ducks inside to gather a large box, an old scarf. When he returns to the snake, he finds it coiled even tighter, head pressed low, but still it hisses. He sets the box on its side in the open doorway, wills a little more of the shop’s heat toward it, hoping it might work as a kind of bait. Picking up strange snakes—that is to say, _unfamiliar_ snakes—is not particularly in his habitude. The snake, predictably, does not move. It isn’t until Aziraphale nudges a bit more of the rain-splash than is likely necessary onto the little beast’s leftmost coils that it lurches toward, and finally into, the box. 

He sets it beneath the yellow glow of the desk lamp. Soon, the snake coils tight again, its biscuit-coloured scales soft-seeming against the green tartan, but at least it seems snug in the scarf’s flannel. It’s not hissing. That’s good. Or it isn’t. What if the creature is unwell? He studies it carefully. It might also be _biding_. Lurking. It doesn’t feel like it is, but then Crowley seldom feels that way, too. Sometimes he does. Sometimes Crowley seems to seethe from the very core of him. But only, Aziraphale notes, when he catches Aziraphale looking while he’s in one of his moods. 

Aziraphale picks up the phone and dials. The message he leaves says only, “I’d like you to look at something for me. I’ll be in the shop, whenever you might have a minute. I’d be much obliged if you could—” and then he hangs up, mid-sentence, as he often finds himself doing. Before he gives Crowley a reason not to answer.

The little snake sleeps, and Aziraphale tries to lose himself in an exceedingly beautiful and frightfully—perhaps even delightfully—inaccurate collection of maps he’d acquired. But instead he peers into the box, tugging back the scarf to be sure the snake is still well. It seems to be—he gets a bit of a glare once. 

“You are quite lovely,” he says, and then is sure he oughtn’t have, in case the snake isn’t—

The bell on the door jangles. “What’ve you got, angel, that I had to come out today?” Rainwater slides along Crowley’s temples, where there is quite a lot less hair than Aziraphale is used to seeing, and quite a lot more across the top, where it’s _spiked_ into a stiff red crest. Not unlike a Roman centurion’s helm in its form, but utterly different in its effect.

“You’ve changed your hair again.” And his clothes. Tears across his black jeans, even in the stomach of his shirt, which appears to be an actual t-shirt, clipped of its collar and sleeves. A leather jacket wraps him close and dark. 

“Punk’s been around, Aziraphale. Even you couldn’t have missed it.” Crowley grins, all white teeth. “D’you like it?” 

“It’s certainly very noticeable.” Let the conversation be about music and not about anything else. The inky serpent sigil stands out even more without the tempering heat of his sideburns nearby. The faintest shade of stubble covers the shaved sides of Crowley’s head, a cinnamon velvet. Aziraphale turns abruptly, palms itching to touch, and gestures to the box. “Here.” 

Crowley looks over the dark rim of his sunglasses. “M’not a veterinarian. Why not ring that Herriot fellow you like so much? ‘All creatures great and small,’ wasn’t it?” He glances toward the back room, where he knows there’s a whole shelf of earthy and sentimental and tragijoyful veterinarian memoirs. They help, strangely, when Aziraphale feels hollowed out by the transient nature of the mortal lives all around him. If only the books had been around quite a lot of centuries sooner. 

“Stop that. I only wanted your opinion—and perhaps some assurance?” Aziraphale raises his eyebrows in what he hopes is a significant enough way. Saying _Has someone from your side sent another serpent for me to thwart?_ out loud makes it feel especially sensational, given that the poor thing isn’t even as long as his forearm and doesn’t seem to have the faintest whiff of perdition about it. But it doesn’t hurt to be cautious. Thorough. “A translator.” 

“You’re that out of practice? You know nineteen words for umbrella.”

“Well, I use an umbrella quite regularly. And you remember that business in Paris—sometimes I forget when it would be most useful not to.” Aziraphale feels his voice growing a bit small. Sometimes there’s just so impossibly much to know and remember, and that’s even with the knowledge—or non-knowledge, the acceptance of the impossibility of knowing, rather—of the ineffable. Of six thousand years on Earth and everything that came before and the vast cosmic weight of what he knows he does not know yet. Sometimes he wants to forget, to live smaller, to only attend to his books, to tasting the world with his ears and his hands and his nose and his tongue. It’s a terribly selfish set of wants, the kind of thing that Crowley would find hilarious or, worse, not comic at all. Maybe even reasonable. Desirable. Aziraphale makes himself laugh—he’s good at laughing at himself. “I don’t speak terribly often to snakes. Or animals, quite broadly. Humans are more than enough.”

Crowley’s left eyebrow forms an improbable point. Like a vaulted arch. 

There is a patch of stained glass in the Catedral de Santa Maria de León that is the exact shades of Crowley’s eyes. It’s only possible to know it, to understand the colour properly, from the inside of the church, when the morning sun strikes the east-facing wall. The House of Light, Pulchra Leonina, soaring windows everywhere, and in one, a small spray of flowers that no one else would find important. The glazier had listened so readily for that reason, Aziraphale supposes. And it is beautiful, impossibly so, for how else could it be? One of the great houses of worship of the world, one of the places in which Grace seemed to hover. And no one else on Earth—no one who was likely to step inside and look, anyway—would recognize the rippling light of a fistful of lilies exactly as they had grown beside the Tree, green-gold in one moment, touched with sunfire in another. That Tree. In that Garden, which only one other being could remember with him, remember exactly as it had been, remember in the way of bodies that were there, with the textures of bent grass and broken fruit. That bit of glass barely larger than his spread fingers is one of Aziraphale’s most carefully kept secrets. 

Crowley’s pointed eyebrow continues to hold Aziraphale’s attention, bearing up under centuries of weight.

Aziraphale edges closer. “You use the languages I’m most acquainted with! Even at the beginning—you didn’t start hissing at me. You spoke. And I run a bookshop in Soho. When do I encounter proper snakes?” Aziraphale nudges the flannel further from the snake’s back. “It is a proper snake, yes? If you please?” 

Crowley barely glances. “Smooth snake. _Coronella austriaca_. Common as chip shops.” 

“But why was it on my stoop?” 

“Bugger if I know.” Crowley slides his glasses back up. “If my lot sends a serpent, it’s a little less subtle than this one.” He reaches into the box, pauses, rubs his hands together a moment before picking up the snake. Again it hisses, but also it twines between Crowley’s fingers, hunkering into them—warm, it seems, a warmth Aziraphale knows is conjured there, rather than naturally occurring. Maybe there’s a faint glow beneath Crowley’s skin, there in his palms. Aziraphale tries not to look at it. Tries not to feel the jaundiced little pang in his own.

“Oh, I thought you were terribly subtle. Really quite.” 

“Yes, but you’re an idiot, angel. Or even you could tell that this is just a very run of the mill, very boring, very plain English snake.” The tip of Crowley’s finger skates along the snake’s back, gently. 

Aziraphale leans closer to the snake. “I don’t think you’re boring, or plain, for the record. You’re very pretty, like a tea and biscuit brocade, and if that’s not the nicest thing—well, I don’t know.” 

The snake sticks its tongue out but not, Aziraphale thinks, unpleasantly, which tempers the vaguely gagging face Crowley makes. His hand hovers above the cuff of Crowley’s jacket. Rather a lot of zippers on this one. “But shouldn’t she still be sleeping—hibernating? It’s a bit cold, isn’t it?” Like it might be a bit cold on the pale skin showing through the ripped denim. Aziraphale nudges the thermostat up with a thought. 

“Bugger. If. I. Know.” 

“But couldn’t you find out? In case we can help.” 

“We.” The word is muttered but perhaps with a fondness.

“Please.” 

“Hold these.” Crowley puts his sunglasses in Aziraphale’s hand and lifts the snake until his large, slit pupils face the snake’s small, round ones. There is a faint whispering sound, like six winds in six doors, and Crowley’s tongue—thin, forked, the one he hides in the guise of a human tongue nearly all the time—flickers between his teeth. 

What the snake says sounds a little the same: one wind, one door. Then it batters its blunt snout against Crowley’s chin, a small, determined fist. 

“For fuck’s sake.” Crowley puts it down. 

“What?” 

“She wants to go home.” Crowley snatches back his glasses, taps them against the bridge of his nose. “Hyde Park. Artemis statue. And the next wanker to pick her up is getting a right biting. She was stuck in a terrarium for eight months in a flat across the street.” 

“And she made it all the way to my doorstep, alone and in the rain?” Aziraphale feels impressed and worried at the same time. She might have been run over by any dozen cars. Or bicyclists. Or stepped on, as sluggish as she’d been. “That’s dreadful. But,” he says, “wouldn’t a terrarium be rather—nicer? No cold rain, for one.” 

“This is a wild thing, angel. She wants to go _home_, not live in a bloody box.” 

“Right now?” Though of course right now. Right this very second. Aziraphale has felt that way himself, so many times. It wasn’t until he bought the bookshop that the place seemed clear, that home was a _where_ and not a when, a _when_ that sometimes felt so terribly far away. And sometimes home wasn’t a place at all, it was something else, something he didn’t dare name. Someone, _a_ someone, and not solely Her Someoneness, if he’s being entirely, bluntly honest, which is a thing he seldom is, at least with himself. Aziraphale looks at the window, the rain pelting down, so he won’t look at Crowley with the way his face feels just now. 

“I don’t suppose your lot understand wildness.” Crowley bares his teeth a moment, the nerve bared with them. “Put your slicker on and don’t be such a southern pansy about it.” 

“I don’t have a slicker.” He has a very smart gabardine trench, as Crowley very well knows. Barely fifty years old. But he does slide on a pair of overshoes. 

Crowley opens his jacket, offers the interior pocket to the snake. She slides in. 

“Oh, you’re coming along?”

“I’m driving.”

“It’s really not that far. Not even three kilometers. Now who’s being—”

“You wouldn’t want her to get cold?” Crowley smiles. Aziraphale braces. Freddie Mercury rhapsodizes. 

But for all that, they still have to slosh their way to the Huntress Fountain and then look for the correct lump of hedge. When they find it, the snake slips quickly from Crowley’s hand and into a hole beneath a stone. It’s cool enough to see passing tourists’ breaths fog. 

“Good riddance, wyrmling.” Crowley dusts his palms. “What kind of self-respecting snake’s the colour of tea and biscuits?” 

Aziraphale blows conspicuously into his bare and not actually cold hands and makes a faint noise, deep in his throat. Crowley picks up a flat stone about the size of a saucer and presses it between his palms. He rests it a moment against his wrist, then holds it out to Aziraphale to touch. “Feels good to me, but—”

To a fingertip, it’s gently warm, but his hands had been out in the rain. Perhaps not so accurate. Aziraphale lifts his chin and touches the stone to his throat. “Oh, I think that’s very nice.” 

Crowley takes it back with an indecipherable look. “You do know what’s making that warm?” 

“You are.” It isn’t untrue. 

Crowley sets the stone flat in the mud, taps it with a fingertip, and the whole thing sinks into the earth. Aziraphale feels it faintly shifting, a whisper of distant contentment. 

“Thank you.” 

Crowley puts his finger against the earth again and a faint whiff of brimstone rises. “Stop trying to write over my demonic wiles. You _asked_ me to do this.” 

“What could possibly be demonic about it? You made a—a tiny hot water bottle for one of God’s creatures in need.” 

“For one, _I_ did it. And two—she’ll grow up to be a lovely big helly Hell-snake—massive wings, fangs, spitting venom—the whole lot. And you not even knowing where your flaming sword is.” 

“Oh, piffle. Smooth snakes aren’t venomous in the least.” Aziraphale lets the corners of his mouth turn up. It feels good to argue with Crowley again like this—arguing about nothing, nothing at all. He is smiling even as Crowley’s heavy, splashing step flings a not-insignificant amount of water right into the wide top of Aziraphale’s left boot. When Crowley is most upset at him, he won’t play the brat. He only disappears, becoming a deep pool of worry in which Aziraphale knows himself reflected.

“She’d have venom and things if I wanted. If she wanted. And maybe she will. Bloody idiot angels not even up to speed on their herpetology.” Crowley’s lower lip tucks beneath his teeth, the way he pins his mirth even to his own bone when he’s trying especially hard not to show it. They arrive at the Bentley and Aziraphale muscles the passenger side door open. 

“You will not be wet in my car,” Crowley says, snapping his fingers, and he’s right. Aziraphale finds himself quite dry, even in the space between the arch of his foot and the sole of his shoe. Quite dry and pleasantly warm. 

It feels so nearly like it had in Paris that Aziraphale dares say, “Dinner?”

And Crowley, as though he hasn’t refused the invitation so often in recent years Aziraphale has become uncertain of asking, says, “Yeah, all right.”

***

“This has been a quiet little favorite of mine in recent years.” Since 1971, to be exact. The first time he’d come into the restaurant, on a Thursday evening, he’d been convinced he would never see Crowley again. At least not like this, as whatever they were he tried not to name. In the worst of his moments, Aziraphale imagined how he would see him, or wouldn’t: a crumple of black fabric; the acrid pinch of burnt feathers; a nebula, winking out.

“Yeah? Best be worth it if you’re dragging me to Hampstead.” 

“You get to drive, don’t you?” No matter how many times he’s sure he’s going to damage the upholstery with his clutching, the Bentley proves resilient, even after the war, when Aziraphale was trying to teach himself classical guitar and had slightly longer-than-usual fingernails on his right hand. And that night in the war, a ruined church, when Aziraphale leaned hard into that leather upholstery Crowley adores because Aziraphale could not lean against Crowley himself. 

Crowley makes a noncommittal sound and takes them through an alley just, Aziraphale is convinced, to make him question his understanding of spatial relations. It’s a kind of brinkmanship: if Crowley catches him miracling the passage ever so slightly wider, he’ll cackle about it for decades. There’d been an incident involving a Macedonian chariot, a hay cart, and a bridge, and Crowley had brought up the incident that night in 1941 as he drove them home through blacked-out London. He’d grinned, so brightly, even though Aziraphale could smell the faint singe of him, knew he had to be hurting. Aziraphale had laughed, too, giddy, the weight of the saved books across his lap. When he thinks about that night—about a few others over the next two decades—how close they’d come and now how far again—it’s a relief when the tyres on Aziraphale’s side actually lift a bit. Fretting about discorporation and watching Crowley’s mouth set smugly—gleefully—as they careen from the alley is better than thinking about that night in at the restaurant in 1971, because to think about 1971 is to also think about 1967, the year Aziraphale had done exactly as he’d told Crowley he would never, bringing him certain destruction in a vacuum flask. Crowley took it from him so solemnly. And offered him a ride. And Aziraphale threw the blown-glass thing between them on the cobblestone street by refusing, by walking away, and Crowley disappeared for a decade.

It wasn’t the first time, Aziraphale told himself then, but it was the first time Crowley had a thermos full of holy water, put in his hands by Aziraphale himself. The phonecalls he made weren’t returned. When he’d gone even as far as the door of Crowley’s flat—the first he’d ever done with this London residence—no one responded to his knocking. A pall of power like black stone hung across everything: Crowley, but impermeable. Unless Aziraphale wanted to attract a great deal of notice and none of it good, impenetrable. So he walked away. He sent a postcard in 1970, one with an ink drawing of the bookshop itself on it. He’d written _Wish you were here!_ on it once, in a fit of desperate hope, miracled the card clean again, wrote it a second time, wiped it again. He posted it, with a proper stamp, blank, unsigned. If Crowley wanted to know, he could find out what Aziraphale had written and wiped away. The message was still there, if the right person looked the right way.

And that same night, Aziraphale said, his eyes cast toward the bookshop’s oculus, above which London’s smog and cloud blotted out the stars, _Lord, You wouldn’t let me not-know, would You?_

That She would let him be heartbroken, that She would let him be so alone—he could believe that. Angel and demon. What did Aziraphale imagine their _together_ could be like? But if Crowley was gone and Aziraphale could not know, not feel it, not sense the tectonic collapse in his heart of hearts—that would be too much, wouldn’t it? But beyond those private, fervent prayers he made in the woolen fog of his own mind, the candles he’d lit in empty sanctuaries without so much as shaping the words with his mouth, lest the wrong entities hear—he did not ask. He only waited. And hoped.

And in October of 1977, the Bentley snarled up to its place on the curb, a new Queen album audible even through the bookshop’s closed doors. Crowley flung himself into the shop, already mid-rant about someone named Sid Vicious, someone who thought himself so _shocking _and _edgy like _he_ had invented rebellion_ and _what a load of absolute bollocks_, which precipitated another exasperated gesture as Crowley threw himself down on the sofa in the back room. Without being invited there. Like he belonged.

For the three years since, at least, they’d seen each other often enough—if not regularly, at such intervals as Aziraphale no longer feared the worst every moment. And Crowley came to look at the snake, and Crowley accepted this invitation to dinner, and Crowley now glances down an alley beside a restaurant in Hampstead, where Chef Jean’s younger son stands with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, staring. Somewhere between Aziraphale putting his hand on the car door’s handle and wobbling out and Crowley coming around the bonnet, Crowley’s hair has gone from that tall, stiff crest to a softer, backswept _something_ over the velveted sides of his head. The leather jacket has become a black sport coat. No more rips. A skinny tie the color of shiraz over a black shirt with no collar. 

“Look at you.” 

“Sartorially appropriate. Can’t make any other promises.” 

By the time they arrive at the host’s stand, the chef’s son is standing there, menus in hand. “Mr. Fell, a pleasure to see you again. And welcome—Mr. Crowley, is it?”

“My reputation precedes me,” Crowley says, again his eyebrow arching, and Aziraphale is reminded of nothing so much as the look he got in Rome. So he had a slip of the tongue one night. It was a compliment and a diagnostic. Crowley would _appreciate_ the use of pickled juniper berries in the tartare, the sharpish nudge past the traditional capers. Aziraphale wants to say, _It wasn’t my fault. I was so worried_, and the staff had been so _kind_. Willing to let him sit at the small table with the wall sconce at his back, where the light was both soft and good enough for reading. Where he couldn’t fret in the bookshop, waiting for someone who wasn’t coming to walk through the door. Chef Jean said Aziraphale had a good palate; sometimes, at the end of service, Jean came to discuss wine, to drink one glass with him. Aziraphale’s been consuming wine for thousands of years, and a good deal of it with Crowley. It’s trebly not his fault the demon’s name had come up.

When Gregory has gone—his gaze forever getting stuck on Crowley in a way that Aziraphale understands too well—he says, “You’ll get something here, won’t you?” Aziraphale glances up from the menu. “Please? It is, of course, my treat.”

Crowley makes a vaguely growling sound, like he might argue, or simply say he isn’t particularly hungry, and then he inclines his head in a way that suggests he’s actually reading the menu. “Oh, the tartare—” And he makes an interested hum.

Gregory comes with a bottle. They haven’t actually ordered yet, but he presents the label, opens it, pours a little for each of them. At the taste, Crowley makes a neutral-to-pleased sound, and Aziraphale has to say, “Oh, that is lovely, dear boy.”

“Bold, leggy red, Mr. Fell, just as you like,” the young man says, failing somewhat at hiding his cheerful innuendo. When he glances at Crowley, though, the blush creeps up his throat, and he actually looks relieved at his brother’s arrival from the kitchen, two small plates in his hands. An amuse-bouche of miniature vol-au-vents, each topped with the golden coin of a quail egg yolk, the pastry perfectly bronzed.

“Your making, Robert?”

The elder brother nods. Aziraphale thanks him, and in a moment, the young men are gone back to their work, and Aziraphale’s attempting to focus on the kitchen’s little gift—unexpectedly bright with _piment d’espalette_—or the wine or anything except the steady weight of Crowley’s attention, a little like amusement flicking at the edges, something else. Nothing so obvious as his gaze, but an intention nearly molecular. Aziraphale clears his throat. “I could make some suggestions—” He gestures toward the menu.

Crowley’s chin dips until a sliver of amber shows beneath the dark glass. “Can I order off-menu?”

“I’m sure Chef Jean will accommodate—” Then he sees where Crowley’s looking, past his shoulder, at Gregory at the host’s stand, who’s still trying not to stare at Crowley. “Don’t you dare. Neither of us is working tonight.” 

Crowley grins, the tip of his tongue at the edge of his teeth. A joke, an easy rise. “I think I did some miracling over a snake, and you _being_ here is you working. The whole place is steeped in angelic fol de rol.”

“It’s not my fault. It’s so _nice_ here. You should feel it—this whole place is wrapped in love. They’ve even a garden—”

“Pity. Can’t.” Crowley pops his vol-au-vent in his mouth, jaw working, face abruptly turned away, and the Principality Aziraphale, being of love, hates himself, very intently, for a moment. Crowley swallows, expression softening slightly. “Can see why you like it, though.”

They order and Aziraphale is relieved to be right about one thing: a meal even Crowley enjoys, which means he’s actually hungry, which makes Aziraphale wonder when the last time he’d eaten was. It’s rare to find Crowley anywhere between indifferent and ravenous. By the time they carry on to a second bottle of wine, the conversation even becomes light again: they argue, as they once did, about Liszt and Shostakovich and a young woman who’d played the lyre at a wedding in Mytilene they both happened to be at. One of the most interesting nights Aziraphale has ever had: the woman with the lyre was supposed to be getting married. Her twin brother was supposed to be playing the music, not hiding behind the veil. It was one of the inexplicable—ineffable—moments when he and Crowley were actually working to achieve the same end: to get the young man and his strapping groom wed without anyone catching on and to help the young woman disappear into the night. And neither Heaven nor Hell would give any indication of _why_ and neither of them heard anything more about the young people afterward.

But it was _fun_. And when it was done, they got roundly drunk and laughed themselves into an actual stupor afterwards. Aziraphale woke with a splitting headache and to find he’d simply slumped across the table from Crowley, and Crowley’s hand was beneath his, there on the rough wood. Aziraphale swallows down the memory and listens to Crowley try to convince him that he really ought to listen to David Bowie, at the very least.

When they return to the Bentley, a cassette rests against the windscreen. A cigarette glows in the alley. Crowley raises the tape in the air, gives it a little shake of acknowledgment. The orange light lifts in mutual recognition. Crowley slides it into the blaupunkt and they drive south to the sounds of a band Crowley says is The Clash. 

“I’ve heard London calling, and I don’t think it sounds like this, actually.”

“Shut up, angel.” The rolling illumination of a streetlight reveals the upturned left corner of Crowley’s mouth. 

Crowley doesn’t come in when he drops Aziraphale at the bookshop, but he does say, “Night, angel. See you,” like he is, in fact, planning to, and it feels as warm as the stone Aziraphale had touched to his throat hours ago.

***

On certain days after that—only sometimes, mind you, and for no reason other than the book was to hand—Aziraphale dials Crowley’s number and reads the opening pages of a novel to the answerphone’s spinning tape.

“_Castle of Otranto_. It’s so ridiculous—actually, I expect you might have had something to do with it. So…flash.” He reads until the machine is full, which also means that no one else can leave a message until Crowley listens to his. That counts as a thwarting, surely, and maybe another later—when Crowley inevitably appears again in the bookshop and all his twining energy gets caught up in the chair he sits on backward, and he grips the wood with one hand, a glass with the other and says, “I’m never going to read it, angel. I’ve told you,” and Aziraphale will say, “I know, I know, you don’t read _books_,” and go quiet until Crowley says, “But go on, tell me how it ends.” Because while Crowley is in the bookshop with Aziraphale, Crowley isn’t anywhere else. When Crowley is spending his curiosity on stories or drinks or the really quite peculiar things people leave in their old books, Crowley isn’t doing anything else. Of course, neither is Aziraphale, but that isn’t so bad, is it? It all evens out.

***

Sometimes they go to the British Museum, or to the Library, and reminisce. What all these chunks of marble and granite looked like in their original homes. What that mystic really got up to. The letters from this writer that had mysteriously disappeared from a lifetime of correspondence. It’s so—_venial_, Aziraphale thinks, and that isn’t something he’d thought of in a long time, not precisely like this. They’re gossiping, he and Crowley, in the most idle and insignificant way. And it’s nice. It’s comfortable. Crowley hasn’t gone in for individual tempting in a long time, and even though he jokes about the Chef Jean’s sons—_oh, vanity, just a nudge, not like he needs my help with the lust, and the older one—pride, and so much of it_—it’s actually a little funny. More than, when Aziraphale is feeling brave, which isn’t as often as he’d like, but at least he hasn’t forgotten how to feel that way. Crowley helps, and he doesn’t.

Sometimes Aziraphale wonders if this is really what temptation is like. A pleasant flush of boldness on the heels of some shared recollection, even as they both know this isn’t something they ought be doing. In the past century, Aziraphale isn’t so sure he’s thwarted anything at all, so much as they’ve simply distracted each other. So much as they’d—conspired. And now they’re simply nattering on.

Maybe, of course, that’s why they’re doing it: if they’re extending their conversation on the Lewis Chessmen into the back room of the bookshop, everything seems so much farther away. If they’re taking a turn about their memories—as one might a garden—perhaps these are simpler times.

“Do you remember the poet, Christopher Smart?” Aziraphale has found another first edition, this one in slightly better condition than the one he had.

“The one with the cat? Oh yes. Absolutely cracked.”

“He wasn’t cracked. He was deeply misunderstood.” Smart had a terrible, compulsive piety toward the end of his life. He’d not been the only one in history that Aziraphale had known—the rapturous nature of faith had compelled more than one person to retreat in utter silence to a cave or wall themselves up in a tiny chapel, let alone the ones who _saw_ the ethereal—and it’s a frightful pity, Aziraphale has occasionally thought, for a human to bear such a burden. One of the moments—ever so many moments: imprisonments, executions, torments in the name of sanity—when he can only tell himself that the Plan is ineffable. It isn’t needlessly cruel. There are reasons. They simply aren’t reasons for Aziraphale to know. “And how do you know about the cat?” Everyone who _read_ the English poets knew about Smart’s cat, but Crowley did not read the English poets.

Crowley shrugs. “What better way to confirm the bloke who falls down in prayer in the middle of a London street is a total nutter than to have him blather on about it to a cat?” Crowley flicks his fingers as though shooing a fly. “Keep away from the madman and keep your faith small and bland and dumb as stones. Makes my job easier.”

“He loved that cat, and he found the Divine in Jeoffry, of course. The cat was far better—kinder—company than most he might have had.” Madhouses in the eighteenth century are another of those things for which Crowley had received a commendation, and when it arrived, he had shouted for a while, drank heavily, and gone to sleep for thirty-four months. When he woke up, he went to America for a while, mucked about in the Revolution. Then Aziraphale hadn’t seen him until Paris.

Crowley swirls the scotch in his glass. “I was hoping he’d be allergic, to boot.”

“Crowley.” Aziraphale finds himself being steadily ignored. He miracles the volume to his hand, certain that summoning a book of poetry ultimately praising the Almighty doesn’t qualify as a frivolous miracle. It would only be suspicious if Gabriel actually read it and thought about it hard enough, and those are two things Aziraphale considers long shots.

He reads, skimming for what seems most pertinent. Smart did rather go on. “Ah,” he says, and reads aloud.

> “For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.  
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.  
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.  
For he is tenacious of his point.  
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.”  


Aziraphale smiles, closes the book around his fingertip. “Sounds like you.”

“Shut up.”

Something tugs sideways at the words, so slightly different than it was so many other times.

“Were—were _you_ Smart’s cat?”

“I said, ‘Shut up, angel.’” He throws back the rest of his scotch. “You really think I could just be a cat?”

“I think you could be or do anything, if you put your mind to it,” Aziraphale says, a certain electricity tripping in him. 

The empty tumbler lands on the end table with a dense click. “Except for what I can’t.” His glasses are gone, snapped into the ether or his pocket, and his slit pupils are narrow, hard. “Can’t be what I’m not. Can’t be forgiven. Can’t go back up.” The -p breaks like a balloon.

“Oh, Crowley. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—it’s only that you’re so awfully clever, you’re more than capable, you _could_—” Could he never do this without putting his whole left brogue in his mouth? He picks up the empty glass. “This could do with a refill—I’ll just—”

By the time Aziraphale turns back with the scotch, Crowley’s chair is empty. He sighs and lifts the glass to his own mouth, turns the pages in his lap.

***

Aziraphale is walking near Charing Cross, some new acquisitions in his satchel, when he almost blunders into Chef Jean’s younger son, who wears a cumbersome walking boot on his left foot. Aziraphale very nearly catches him by his cast-bound right wrist, snatches him upright by the elbow instead.

“My dear boy, what—”

Gregory blinks moonishly at him. It has been some time of course—more than a decade since the last time. Not at all a boy now, silver shooting his hair, so much like his father, who closed his restaurant and retired, moved home to France. Robert went to New York to start his own restaurant. Gregory has become a policeman, a detective, of all things.

Gregory says, still with a bewildered furrow in his brow, “It’s funny I run into you, too.”

***

That very afternoon, Aziraphale phones Crowley, asks him to pop in when he can. Not more than an hour later, Crowley breezes through the doors.

“Do you know who I saw today?”

Crowley says, “Elvis.” Since 1978, Crowley has been saying this.

“Chef Jean’s son who was so smitten with you. Said he saw you.”

What Gregory had actually said was _I think he saved my life. I can’t remember it right, but I swear he was there._ And he described how his motorcycle rolled over him, pinned him to a wrought-iron fence, how something had hurt so incredibly much in his chest and his back and then the woman he’d avoided hitting was screaming, and then Mr. Crowley was there—different hair than before—and the motorcycle wasn’t on him anymore. He wasn’t pinned. Just the ankle and the wrist hurting. Bit banged up, but all right, all things considered. _I would have said it was just panic, that I knocked the wind out of me, but when the ambulance came, I still had a mouthful of blood, a tear in my shirt, blood everywhere, but not a mark on me. Not even a cut lip._

What had Aziraphale said, there in the street? _The Lord works in mysterious ways. I’m so glad you’re all right._ He’d hugged the man. He does not hug people, as a rule.

To Crowley, Aziraphale says, “You helped him.”

Crowley bats his long-fingered hand. “I moved a motorcycle. He loves punk music, wanted to be the next Joe Strummer, and he became a Yarder. Marks & Spencer button downs and bad ballpoint pens. That beautiful, angry bastard and now look at the poor sod. Saving him was the cruelest thing I could do.”

Nevermind that Gregory seems to like his job, seems good at it. Crowley’s not even trying to fool himself—there’s a little curve in the edge of his mouth. Aziraphale can guess what he’s thinking about: one more night of them lingering in Chef Jean’s restaurant through closing, Crowley deciding to go smoke with the boys while Aziraphale finished his Sauternes and his chat. Aziraphale coming out of the restaurant to hear the Bentley’s stereo on, Freddie Mercury breaking free in the blaupunkt—two years before that song would actually be released on any album. Robert saying something, his face serious, Gregory’s closed knuckles landing on his brother’s shoulder, not terribly hard but not soft, either. Gregory saying, _Because fuck ‘em, right?_ Crowley glanced toward Aziraphale and held wide his arm so naturally, so invitingly, Aziraphale stepped into it, and Crowley’s hand rested on his hip for just a moment. Like it belonged there. Long enough for a sweet, conflicted young man to imagine a future he might dare want for himself. A future with love. Aziraphale knows what he and Crowley looked like, half a dozen nights at that intimate table. The way he can’t always control what’s in his eyes when Crowley’s there. The way Crowley let him get away with it then.

They didn’t talk about that comfortable, impossibly perfect and impossibly terrifying touch on the drive home. Crowley didn’t come into the bookshop after, didn’t come by for half a year. Half a year in which Aziraphale set his own hand on his own hip and tried to replicate the feeling and couldn’t. A thing they might both dare to want. Aziraphale, in the bookshop, in 2002 and not in a shard of memory in 1982, says, “You healed him.” He hadn’t been aware Crowley could do that.

“Human bones break very easily. Design flaw. I manifested a critique.”

“You pulled splintered ribs from of a number of important organs, I think.” Closed some gaping rent in skin, in muscle.

“It’s like when banks hire professional thieves to try to rob them. I pointed out the weak points, if Anyone cares what I think, which She doesn’t.” 

“Thank you.”

“Don’t.”

A dozen other things fill Aziraphale’s mouth. _I thank you anyway. I am so grateful to you. For you._ He pours Malbec into glasses. _If I can’t say it, what can I do? What will you accept?_ His hands are open, waiting. He puts a glass in his right, curls his left over the stem, too. Crowley reaches past him for the other, a hair’s breadth from his ear. Enough to feel the air shift. Not close enough.

But he succeeds in keeping his mouth shut for a moment, long enough for Crowley to drink half of his glass, long enough for Crowley to settle his shoulders into the plush of the sofa, to splay his arms across its back, for his ankle to rest on his knee. With his chin pointed toward the ceiling, he says, “Put something on, angel.” The barest tilt toward the gramophone.

Aziraphale sets Bach’s cello suites on the turntable.

Crowley refills his glass. “You’re going to make me listen to a gavotte.” His mouth turns up at one corner.

“Oh, that’s only if you stay until the fifth and sixth. You’ll be safe with minuets for a bit.” _Please_.

A comfortable noise. The cellist’s bow treads both bright and deep across the strings. Crowley’s eyes drift closed, slit open again. “This is du Pre.”

“It is.” He could not try to reconcile what multiple sclerosis had to do with ineffability, what cutting short so brilliant a career—he couldn’t. That’s not for him to know. But it still makes him sad.

“Angel,” Crowley says, “you’re a soft touch.” His legs shift, stretch out long. His crossed ankles rest there beside Aziraphale’s, not close enough, and then they are. Black denim against his buff wool trousers, that point of pressure that will in time grow warm between them.

Aziraphale’s gramophone never needs hands to turn the record over, and his vinyl collection isn’t aware that a record isn’t intended to have a multi-hour play time. The machine simply plays the entirety of Bach’s Cello Suites because Aziraphale thinks it should. And no matter what Crowley says about their respective scores on composers, listening uninterrupted to Jacqueline du Pre play this music could not be anything but divine.

Crowley stays through all six suites, and through them again, and they speak but little, and the third time the second suite slides through the prelude, it’s clear Crowley is asleep, loose and boneless.

While Aziraphale is pulling a book into his hand, perhaps a cup of cocoa arrives beside it and a plush throw settles more gently and silently than down across Crowley, who has not moved his legs away from Aziraphale’s.

***

Aziraphale is half-heartedly trimming one of the Dowlings’ hedges when he hears Warlock’s voice, Nanny Ashtoreth’s following quickly on the heels of the questions. Through the verdant screen, Aziraphale can see four-year-old Warlock holding up what look like American bank notes. Warlock has a predilection for borrowing without intent to return. On one hand, Aziraphale thinks he should worry—that’s clearly Advantage: Hell—on the other, the boy is four, too curious to act in outright malice, and Aziraphale can’t bring himself to feel bad about Mr. Dowling’s money being turned into boats on the koi pond or bits of multicolored flame when the boy sneaks closer to the fireplace in the gardener’s cottage. Aziraphale has twice pretended not to notice what the boy has tossed in. Nanny Ashtoreth has twice chosen not to comment on his apparent ignorance, beyond the faint hint of a curve on the leftmost edge of her mouth.

Warlock leaps, brandishing green paper as close to Nanny’s shaded eyes as he can. “Who’s this?”

“George Washington.”

“Why?”

“He was the first American president.”

“This?”

“Benjamin Franklin, dear.”

The boy sings a little snatch of an American rap song that makes Aziraphale’s eyes go wide. Apparently, many things are _all about the Benjamins, baby_.

“And one of the most influential men in his world because he wanted to know things and he found them out. And other people found this very…attractive.”

“He’s fat and bald.”

“There are more paths to power than beauty, little one.”

“Is that why you told the cook off for making fun of Brother Francis?”

The hedge-clippers go still in Aziraphale’s hands. Whatever Nanny says is lost in Warlock twirling away, arms spread like an airplane until he comes careening back, still paper flapping in his fists. He thrusts another one in front of Nanny Ashtoreth’s dark glasses.

“Him?” 

Nanny smiles, with real warmth, the kind that makes Warlock go still a moment. “That,” she says, “is Alexander Hamilton. A man of staggering ambition. And a wicked sense of humor. He had quite a lot to do with American political parties and the banking system. National debt.” She’s more grave when she says he was killed in a duel, but Warlock is already pivoting, taking up her umbrella like a sword. She’s saying something about it having been pistols, actually, when she takes the boy’s hand, leads him away, still talking. Alexander Hamilton: fashionable, if colorful, dresser. Brave, even rash. Warlock’s still stabbing the air and she lets him, and for a moment, the dual points of chin and nose tip up, tip out in profile. Wistful, Aziraphale would say, were he saying anything to anyone just now. 

Aziraphale fights down his very selfish curiosity—what was it she’d said about him?—and lets himself think instead about how much better at this role Crowley is than he is himself. How much more easily Crowley can slink into a time, a place. Nanny Ashtoreth is not powerful here because she is beautiful; the humans don’t find her especially beautiful. Commanding, severe, yes. Intimidating. But Warlock calls her pretty, sets his pale little hands in her hair, and more than once has stolen her lipstick, made his own small mouth as red. And Nanny indulges him, braids his hair into a crown with impossibly clever fingers, sets it about with flowers. A little secret no one is intended to see. Certainly the Dowlings would have some opinions, and the hidebound cook, but Nanny Ashtoreth indulges the boy. Yes, Aziraphale knows about the dire lullabies and their moral push-pull, but this is something else. Crowley has become the role he’s playing, and Warlock loves her, and it makes Aziraphale’s stomach clench. Aziraphale has his enthusiasms, his own strengths, he knows, but Crowley’s adaptability is something he might be tempted to envy. Were he not a being intended to defy such base feelings as envy. He sets the sharp blades on a wayward branch and presses the handles to. The branch falls. He tells himself he has done his job correctly.

Later, while he’s reading his way through the first hours of darkness, he hears footsteps on the dewy grass, hears them less with his ears than with centuries of recognition, a stirring in the ether. 

It’s Nanny—or Crowley—some version in-between that softens yet still another place in Aziraphale: hair curling at the base of the neck, at the edges of the temples. A dark, soft sweater draped around the shoulders, loose trousers. No shoes. It’s too dark to see if those feet are bare or if someone’s gone walking in stocking feet. 

Aziraphale takes one step past the cottage’s threshold. It’s Crowley’s voice, not Nanny’s, that says, “Shut up, angel.” There’s so little sting in it.

“I didn’t say anything.” 

“You were thinking about it.”

“Maybe I wasn’t.” They both know he was. It’s something Aziraphale is working on, trying to know when what Crowley wants is for him to ask, and when what Crowley wants is quiet. The problem is that it changes so often. The problem is that Aziraphale puts his words where he wants to put his wings: there in the air around his one proper companion for all these years. His—word he doesn’t even dare think. But he’ll ask tonight because Nanny Ashtoreth does not leave the house by nights save on rare circumstance. The result of that fact is that Aziraphale finds himself strangely lonely despite the fact that he and Crowley are more in proximity now than ever they were. “What brings you out?” 

“Ssh,” Crowley says, passing by the thick stand of arbor vitae that shields the cottage from the main house. His hand is outstretched; the dew gilds his fingers in the thread of light from the window. It catches at his ankles, dark and shining the way Nanny Ashtoreth’s stockings are not, even when they’re wet. He’s seen Warlock tug her along through puddles. Nanny always goes, springing and muddy. But this is Crowley’s skin, in another in-between. 

Aziraphale closes his mouth and watches Crowley weave along the flowerbeds, touching everything. He’s not talking to the plants, doesn’t even seem to be judging them. Only touching them, quietly. Aziraphale tucks the stopper against the door, steps inside with the night air still streaming in behind him. Crowley will come in or he won’t, of his own will, and that’s important, too. 

Aziraphale makes tea and brings the pot into the cottage’s little sitting room, picks up his book again, very nearly sits in his chair, thinks better of it. He settles on one end of the worn sofa. Maybe he hums as he reads, keeps on—with barely a hitch, the merest hint of syncopation which wouldn’t sound out of place to anyone except someone who’s known him for six thousand years and knows that such a sound has never sounded at home in his throat—keeps on even as Crowley comes in. The door whispers closed behind him; he pours himself tea he’ll taste and hold but likely not drink. Without invitation. Perhaps like comfort. Aziraphale holds his breath and keeps his eyes on the page and Crowley sits on the sofa’s other side. Not on the chair, so separate. His dark-scaled feet leave damp marks on the ottoman, still soft-shining. 

How long has it been since Aziraphale saw him this way? After the church, the bombing. Then the soles of his feet were bared in pain. In the very heart of the bookshop, by the light of an actual oil lamp and its flame turned so low that even without the blackout curtains across the shopfront they would still be invisible to the rest of the world. Crowley accepted the cushion he was offered, did not accept Aziraphale’s attempt to help—not even so much as to untie a shoelace, let alone a miracled balm. But he stayed through morning, accepting a space two and a half floor tiles away from Aziraphale as the right kind of haven for what must pass for healing. 

And now there’s this, whatever this is. When Crowley shifts, there’s a dark line of scale down the back of his neck, fanning out wider where the sweater’s collar sags. Crowley, wearing a sagging collar. Something knit. A garment that shows how plainly the snake is what Crowley’s body wants to relax into, curl up in. 

He can’t quite hold the silence. He says, “Are you all right, my dear?” because he cannot say _You could, you know. Here with me. Be any way you like. I like them all._

“It’s not always like that,” Crowley says, like he knows what year Aziraphale is remembering. “The dew feels nice. Sometimes I miss it.” His feet wiggle. Like this, there’s only the suggestion of toes, the shape of them, only a small split where the thong of a sandal might go. Aziraphale finds himself charmed by the gesture, understands that he feels so charmed so easily, where Crowley’s involved.

Crowley slips a little lower against the cushion, shoulders digging in. After another quiet in which Aziraphale’s eyes touch the words in his lap but do not read, Crowley says, “S’been a long day. Long _year_. Good to get comfortable for a bit.” His hand rests on the cushion between them, pats. Aziraphale is not stupid enough to read it as an invitation, but it seems to say _for this, I can count on you_. Creature comforts. If this conversation dared be out loud, dared all the things Aziraphale wished he dared, he might cup that dark ankle and press his knuckles soft against the suggestion of an arch and grin and say, _Creature, indeed._ Might say, _I would comfort you every way you need. Every way I can._

Instead, he drinks his tea, and eventually Crowley says, “We ended up going through the whole of the American Revolution today.” And Crowley sighs, deep and slow, the teacup centered in his palm. His other hand closes over it. He rouses himself to something not like cheer. “You’d be proud. I didn’t tell a single lie.” 

“So would General Washington.” He gets a gratifying eye-roll.

Crowley says, “Funny. Both Heaven and Hell were keen on the Americans actually pulling it off, and now look where we are.” His chin tips toward the house, out of sight, never out of mind. No America, no American ambassador. Could that have meant no Antichrist? At least not yet? 

“What did the boy think of Mr. Hamilton?” Aziraphale has looked at the ten dollar note often enough, studied a man with a handsome visage and a presence in Crowley’s life that should not spark him to jealousy but it does all the same. Alexander Hamilton, one of the few humans that Crowley had counted as friend for the brief flicker of a mortal life. Aziraphale had never met him, had heard about it all nearly two centuries later, and some of it second- and third-hand. In Paris, Crowley had only said he was wiling about in America. Did not enumerate how: He was masking spies in a cloak better than night when the moon would not veil. He kept powder dry on a freezing night on the Delaware; he stitched iron and pride into men’s spines and made himself look when they killed each other over honor. When he whispered that honor was not worth it, they decided themselves that it was, and free will is the freedom to be wrong. He was splitting the nascent republic into parties that would tear at each other’s throats for two hundred and fifty years. He was writing—sometimes a voice at a man’s ear, sometimes with the ink on his own fingers.

“Warlock didn’t want to hear about banks and reams of paper. Liked the parts about stealing cannon, about the duels.” Crowley’s exhale judders. He brings the cup to his mouth and Aziraphale sees him actually swallow. _Hamilton had style_, Crowley said once. Style and a temper and chip on his shoulder the size of the Louisiana Purchase. His friends loved him. His enemies hated him. _At least it felt clear. You knew where you stood with him._. Not like them, sometimes, in these moments like this. Surely She knows. She knows, because that’s how omniscience works. But She’s never done anything about it. They both know She could. They both know She _has_. _Tetchy_, Aziraphale said once. But he doesn’t know what She thinks of this. If She thinks of this, of them, an angel and a demon on a green tartan sofa, cups of tea. They’ve never managed to be enemies correctly, not even close, and yet here is this cushion between them. Here is six thousand years and no proper bridge in everything they’ve built. At least none Aziraphale feels that he can cross and then set alight the way he sometimes wants. Not to Hell. Not for Hell. Never that. But. Aziraphale records the rosy wash still clinging to Crowley’s lips. 

He reaches, pauses, gestures at the wine-dark wave of Crowley’s hair. Crowley, who only tips his head closer so Aziraphale can pluck the stray bit of leaf free. Aziraphale does, puts the small green fragment on the edge of the ottoman like evidence before a judge. It wasn’t only indulgence, a millisecond of touch.

He clears his throat. “Even the Antichrist is a bit young for the Reynolds Pamphlet?” Aziraphale knows that Hamilton’s egregious—and embarrassingly public—infidelity wasn’t Crowley’s doing. That’s only the splintered desperation of humanity choosing incorrectly, a lonely and forever-hungry man, a thing Aziraphale wishes he didn’t feel he might understand. 

“Something like that.”

“That broke his wife’s heart. But still she forgave him.” Oh, but Heaven had loved Elizabeth Schuyler. Crueler, then, how it turned out for her. The ones most beloved set to so much wrack: a dead son, a husband dead the same way. Crowley had liked her, had liked Angelica, too. What does it mean when things like this agree? Sometimes that little loop of hope feels like it spans something, but someone has to test it first. Not just a foot—not just the place where one shin touches another—but with one’s whole weight. The problem is if it breaks. 

“And then he broke her heart again.” The china hangs loosely from Crowley’s fingertips. The hint of polish, like another kind of glass. “By dying, but. Well. That’s how it goes. No one gets to stay together.” 

“It doesn’t have to be like that.”

“Doesn’t it?” Crowley’s head lolls, the fire of his eyes melancholy-muted. “Someone has to go first. Even if they haven’t driven the other one away with some other stupidity already.” The sigh he makes is not quite a yawn, is heavier, wearier than that.

“Well—” _Not if the parties involved are immortal_ crowds in. They haven’t driven each other away—not entirely. On worse days, he thinks, _not yet_, and then there are the days when despair rattles through him, a despair he doesn’t think it should be possible for an angel to feel, and he thinks about that thermos of holy water. He thinks about what other costs there might be if he puts his hands on Crowley’s hands, his mouth on Crowley’s mouth. If he shouldn’t simply be grateful that they have this much. He’ll ruin them with his wanting.

Aziraphale says, “That’s nothing to worry about now.” He turns a page he hasn’t read. “You can rest. I’ll be sure to wake you in time.” Before the boy wakes, the boy in the house, the inhabitants of which will all sleep soundly, all past sun-up, all with gentle dreams. He can’t do that to Crowley, not with this little exhale of power, but he can do this: the fireplace woken, the room warm enough for a serpent to sleep, if only he’ll let himself. 

Crowley turns his face against the corner of the sofa, arms now crossed on his chest, his dark feet pulled beneath him. When Aziraphale looks again, pages past, Crowley has changed again: he is all black coils, he is all knotted silk. Aziraphale remembers so terribly long ago, slides his hand softly down from the crown of the narrow, black head, where in another form, another life, another, braver hand than his, might have combed through hair. All of Crowley’s obsidian muscle shifts, minutely, into the touch, and Aziraphale hopes, but even in sleep, he slinks no closer. 

***

No dog.

As Crowley drives, as the anxiety ratchets through them both, Aziraphale tries to think of some kind of plan, some kind of possibility, and he can’t. What he wants to do is take Crowley up on his offer: where could they go? Where can they be safe, where could they ever be together? The only place is memory: another end of another world. An edge. A hope. He doesn’t feel hope now, so he retreats to the past.

In the memory, he’s standing on a rocky cliff, the _Mare Tenebrosum_ heaving dark and fracturing into white foam below. Finisterre, the edge of the world. Of course it isn’t, and this vast, turbulent sea is only the Atlantic. It’s not even the westernmost point of the European continent, but the locals don’t know that yet and anyway, it feels like world’s end. The bright edge of it. The water’s so wild here, the air so crisp—Aziraphale pulls the salted scent of mist and that bracing chill into his lungs that don’t really need it but do quite like it.

A good night. Twenty-five leagues to the east, a shepherd girl sits vigil beside a stone sarcophagus covered all over with scallop shells and holds her dog and sings thankgivings into the quiet. Her father is gone to fetch a priest. Their sheep doze where one day there will be a great cathedral, one that will draw the world, built around the bones of St. James—Santiago, they call him here—miracled all this way. Aziraphale does love a good _traslatio_. In time, there will be stories: this heavy coffin was brought all the way from Jerusalem by one devout man on a raft, through two seas, so many storms; the coffin floated by itself; there was an angel; there was a star; there was a dragon guarding the place, destroyed with prayer. But tonight, there is a girl with her dog, and she is safe and the priest will come and see and understand, and Aziraphale has done exactly as intended.

Should he be surprised at the sudden feeling that he’s not alone? Maybe, were he not so pleased. 

“You’re a long way from—”

“—everywhere, angel. Just like you.” Crowley shakes his hair from his eyes, and the wind hurls it back, does it again, and again, long strands lashing at his cheeks and eyes, unshaded in this lonely midnight. But Crowley doesn’t force the air still. 

Aziraphale takes a piece of string from the pouch on his belt, holds it out. “If you want—”

Crowley’s blood-moon eyes narrow, then he turns, presents the whole back of his head to Aziraphale. “If my hair catches fire because you forgot you blessed the string, you and I are going to have words.” 

“I did no such thing.” Because it would be absurd to try to gather up the strands all tumbled on each other, he combs Crowley’s hair with his fingers. They slip deep enough to brush his scalp; where he gathers the garnet cable of it, he touches Crowley’s neck. He has forgotten to breathe.

Crowley shifts and he loses his grip and he has to do it again. Again. Crowley sneezes. Crowley has never sneezed in his presence before. The hair jerks free. Again. The wind batters them more and Aziraphale is gathering strands like spun wine from beneath his jaw, the tip of his middle finger against Crowley’s throat. Again. Does he hear some small sound from Crowley or does he only wish he heard it? Again. And then the string is tied and Aziraphale wishes the string would break so he could take out a new one, try again. Again.

Crowley shakes his head—testing, maybe—and says “better” like he doesn’t mean it at all. But the hair isn’t stuck to his mouth, in his eyes. He says, “Why do you have string?”

“It’s useful to have. What if I break my belt? Or a shoe? Or my dear adversary has a calamity of coiffeur?”

“You are ridiculous.”

Aziraphale can’t help the grin that rises. “You’re the one standing here with me.”

“Only because you’re ridiculous enough to fall in and too—something—to miracle yourself out.”

“I only sink in water if I want to.” Crowley knows that. There’d nearly been an incident in Rome because Aziraphale had forgotten. Crowley kicked over a very large amphora of oil to distract eight other people from the fact that he’d taken two steps across the surface of the tepidarium. He glances up, feels the grin widen. “Do you want to go out there?” In more ancient times, this was a place pilgrims came, and they will come here when they come to see the relics of Santiago, too. They will burn their shoes and their old clothes on these rocks, they will dip their weary bodies in the sea and become another kind of clean. He tips his head toward the clash and batter of the water, the roil of it. He’s never walked out on water like this, so stirring. He wants to, wants to know how it will feel on the bottoms of his feet. 

Crowley’s eyebrow rises. It’s the middle of the night, but the starlight feels almost bright enough for reading. His arm sweeps toward the water. _After you._ Aziraphale puts aside his shoes, kilts his robe a little higher. 

He says, “If you take my hand—” and he offers it.

There is the slightest shift in Crowley’s wrist. “Better not.” Dark wings unfurl from his shoulders, the first Aziraphale has seen them since the walls of Eden. “I’ll manage.” 

They go down the rocks like mortals, spray-washed where the water kicks, and then Aziraphale takes the first step out, putting his foot on the spine of two waves heaving together. He whoops—it’s _cold_—and Crowley wings out, an arm’s length between his feet and the water. Aziraphale rests his pilgrim’s staff across his shoulders as he walks, rests his wrists across it, and all the powers of the water dash against his arches, delightfully. 

“End of the world, eh?”

“It’s exhilarating.” Aziraphale throws back his head to look again at the stars. “Utterly breathtaking.” 

“You don’t even have to breathe. How does that mean anything?” Crowley is steadfastly peering down at the black water, which is too wave-worried to show a proper reflection of the sky-wonder above. His arms knot hard across his chest and his wings seem to labor, holding him so carefully over the water. 

Right. The cold. Aziraphale slides his left foot out. “Stand here. It’ll hold you, I promise.” 

The beat of Crowley’s wings buffets him over the sea’s breath. “You think I can balance on the top of your foot.” It’s a shipwreck sea.

“I’ve seen you do more with less.” He holds out his hand again, and again Crowley doesn’t take it. But he does grip the end of the walking-stick, and one of his feet lands lightly on Aziraphale’s, and he balances there for a moment, long enough to set one sole against the chill, thrashing water. 

Then he yelps, calls Aziraphale a lunatic, and flaps forcefully back to shore. Aziraphale gets a face-full of black feathers, tumbles to a splashing seat, and laughs. It’s only after they’re both standing again at the top of the rock (Crowley manifesting a bit of heat into the arches of his feet while muttering dire things at Aziraphale again) that Aziraphale feels that old clap of uncertainty. Surely he’s not supposed to laugh in Crowley’s company—not like this, at least—and surely he’s not supposed to remember the silken slip of a pinion against his nose, mouth, cheek? Surely it should feel unpleasant; he should be able to taste the absence of grace. But he doesn’t. It felt nice. Now he shivers.

He says, “There are some shepherds.” He points northeast, where the rock turns to green hills. “We could—”

“Play tug of war for their souls?” Crowley sighs.

“Eavesdrop, I was going to say.”

Crowley brightens a little, then shakes his head. “If they’re just going to gabble about that scallop-shell covered—” 

“Oh. You saw that.”

“Of course I saw it.” 

“You don’t think the tomb of Santiago will make a suitable site for a pilgrimage?” Aziraphale spreads a palm toward the Milky Way, its starry spread all lavender and cream above them. It’s one of those sights—like there are hands pulling wider the span of this corporation’s ribcage. It shouldn’t feel good, he thinks, but it does. Oh, it does. “They’re already calling the place—bit farther inland—the field of stars. _Campus stellae_.” He smiles. Santiago de Compostela. There will be miracles along the way. There are miracles already here.

Crowley’s eyes dart up but his chin doesn’t. “Yeah, fitting touch. Looking forward to the thieves lying in ambush, the local lords who charge the poor penitent to cross bridges, the inevitable holy war or three.” He sniffs. “Look, angel. Good seeing you, but I’m not really—”

“I told you—that’s farther inland. These fellows—locals—have a boy who’s passing good on the pipes and an old chap with a stunning baritone. You’ll like it.” He pats the wineskin all at once hanging from his shoulder. “Bit of cider to go with it. Very good apples in this part of Iberia.” Aziraphale lifts his eyebrows. _Let this tempt you, please._

Now Crowley’s head cranes back, facing all that starry light, but his eyes are closed. Still, he says, “All right.” 

They go, they sit, they eavesdrop on the songs the shepherds sing to keep themselves awake through the long night. They don’t say much. Their fingers overlap only once as they pass the cider back and forth. When the sun comes up and Crowley is asleep where one beam strikes, Aziraphale shapes a bower over him, one that won’t block the warmth but one to hide him from view. 

London smudges through the Bentley’s windscreen. Where could they go like that hill in Galicia? Nowhere, Aziraphale knows, nowhere to hide from this. Now that he knows who made them, he’s still never told Crowley how much he loves those stars, that galaxy in particular, that night under all its radiant light. The work of Crowley’s hands. But then, everything they’ve both made is about to wink out. Finisterre was supposed to be the end of the world. It didn’t feel at all like this.

***

The day after the day they survived, Aziraphale takes a walk for the sheer pleasure of being able to do it. To listen to the human clatter all about him, to scent the competing cacophony of curry and exhaust, a young man’s appalling cologne and someone’s sweet tobacco. All real. More, perhaps, than it had been the day before, inside the snow globe of the Ritz at tea-time. There, Aziraphale only remembered the shivering giddiness of it all: the world hadn’t ended. This hadn’t ended: Crowley, sitting chin in hand, across from him, bubbles in their glasses. Afterward, they’d drifted toward the park, as was their wont, and Aziraphale was working his way toward suggesting they retire to the bookshop, when Crowley slumped against a lamppost. With his hand on the black iron, his face contorted into a staggering-looking yawn. 

“Oh,” Aziraphale said. “Yes, it has been a long day, rather.” Words formed on his tongue: _you can stay at mine, if you like._ The way Crowley had offered him, so easily, the night before. But before he could say the words, Crowley was walking away, as though hurried, as though half-drunk. Of course he wasn’t—not from the Ritz—but it had been rather an exhausting pair of days. And Crowley had halted the universe, moved himself and Aziraphale and Adam out of time and space and into a place Aziraphale did not know was possible. All because Aziraphale wanted him to do it. Because Aziraphale told him to think of something, and he had, and it worked. 

He called after, “Get some rest,” and Crowley said, “I’ll see you,” and he’d swiveled on his liquid ankles, looked at Aziraphale as he said it. When he turned away, it was as though he’d tripped, catching himself against the Bentley, parked much closer than it had been before. 

Aziraphale goes back to the bookshop that afternoon scolding himself for his selfishness, for keeping Crowley so long when he was clearly so spent. The scold returns as he stands outside of Crowley’s building. That was only yesterday, and a day isn’t much of a rest by Crowley’s standards. But it’s also nearly a civilized hour for a glass of something, and that’s usually a good enough reason for Crowley. It could be in the name of celebration, still. Or they could stay in, and maybe Crowley wouldn’t mind if he read while Crowley napped. That might be just the thing, really. All at once, Aziraphale hates the idea of not seeing him, hates it so much he can’t keep himself in the street.

At the door to Crowley’s flat, though, he hesitates: a scrim of power vibrates in the wall, a ward, a warning. But where years ago Aziraphale had felt something similar, this is mere netting to that stone bulwark. He says, “Crowley,” and though his voice is not loud, he knows it will carry. The decibels are immaterial. But he knocks, all the same, to be polite. 

Where his knuckles touch the wood, it’s like a fingertip passing into a soap bubble. Whatever veil this is, it lets him pass in a way the last one never promised to, but Crowley doesn’t answer. Aziraphale throws open the door, feels the power slide closed behind him, slowly. So thin. 

The scent of char hangs in the air and Aziraphale bolts headlong into the flat, past the plants and the chair and the place where he’d cleaned away the last traces of Ligur only two nights ago and through the sitting room and there are black feathers strewn across the floor. Aziraphale tastes sulfur and fear as he pushes into the dim space of Crowley’s bedroom. Feathers and limbs spill across the bedspread. 

Aziraphale gasps a name and Crowley shifts, winces. 

“Angel.” 

Crowley’s voice is the sound of old screaming. Aziraphale remembers the flood, the morning after a different angel opened all of those unbloodied doors in Egypt, remembers Culloden and the Somme and Passchendaele. The Titanic, how the deck plunged and no matter how cold the water what all it could not numb. The Great Fire and another great fire and the sounds of those are all the same. A windswept steppe where Aziraphale stood with a girl and the eagle on her arm and a horse that could no longer get up and a horizon that stayed empty long after she had no more sound to make.

The rage turns incandescent in him. Aziraphale touches a knee to the bed, his spread hand three inches from skin. “What happened? _Who—_?” He throws power at the walls like cannonfire, a silent thunderclap. The curtains buck. In the hallway, something falls. Down on the street, three car alarms go off, and Aziraphale silences them so quickly they may never work again. The walls faintly glow. Let anyone try to enter now. 

From his slumped pile, Crowley laughs. Even that sounds like it hurts, but he is laughing, and Aziraphale feels himself ease, fractionally. Enough that he dares take Crowley’s hand, squeeze it. The returned pressure is a benediction, but he winces again. 

“Stand down,” he whispers. “S’old. The other day. Dealing with it now.” His eyes blink their stirred honey.

“What—” 

“Shut up.” Crowley’s fingers thread between his. “Later.” His eyelids fall, and he’s still again. 

Because Aziraphale cannot for a moment imagine doing anything else, he eases himself onto the bed’s edge, toes off his shoes, dares put his back against the headboard. 

He whispers, “Crowley,” and his heart shouts it, and Crowley’s eyes slit open again. 

“Stop calling me.” 

But one arm snakes out, curls around Aziraphale’s waist, and then Crowley’s head is on his lap, his clutching arm tight until it goes entirely limp again. Aziraphale is left looking at the damage: the burnt edges of feathers smearing actual soot on his clothes, on the dark sheets, on Crowley’s arms and back where they brush. The rake and score of flame—like the image of the thing carved into his skin—over every inch of him. Not the burn of physical fire, not what happens to gross matter. On the onyx-scaled soles of his feet, cracks like broken glass. 

Aziraphale cannot countenance his own stupidity, his naivete. No, hellfire would not destroy Crowley, but of course it could hurt him. That’s what it was designed to do, to be: an instrument of suffering for the damned. Suffering doesn’t work if it makes an end of its object. For the undamned—for an angel—certain annihilation. For Crowley, mere torment. Only bone-scarring agony. 

Aziraphale excoriates himself. He should have known, he should have _thought_. Crowley had told him, in exhaustive detail, of the night Adam Young was delivered into Crowley’s hands. _They made me sign for him. Bloody Antichrist, dropped off by demonic DHL. I hate signing for things._ A char-white circle on the tip of Crowley’s index finger that didn’t fade through that whole night they’d spent so very inebriated. Should have remembered not only that this could have happened but that Crowley would let himself be so scourged. For him. For Aziraphale, who suffered no more than the affront to his senses: each of Hell’s dead-thing odors, the perpetual crawl of his skin, the lurch in him, atomic, with every near-touch. But no harm. 

What Aziraphale had worried about was Crowley’s feet. Whether they would sting and pang as they had in the church. But the bare and echoing tier of Heaven Crowley had described wouldn’t have been a place made expressly holy. That was not a place blessed and celebrated and steeped in prayer as a nave, a sanctuary, the foot of an altar. And Crowley had seemed fine yesterday, until he hadn’t. It had simply seemed a bit of good luck for them, finally. 

He wants to shake Crowley awake, ask him _how_, ask him _why_, say _how_ dare_ you damage yourself for me, how dare you visit hurt on yourself, yourself whom I love_. 

The word reverberates through his mind, his chest, rings out into the ether where his own wings rest, and he thrusts the feeling into that blue, echoing space so it can’t come into this room, can’t wake Crowley, who said _stop calling me_ and yet all of Aziraphale can do nothing else. He holds the breath in his lungs; he forces white pinions to the stillness of pack-ice and still the force grates, pushes toward Crowley tucked against him; he closes every eye. He counts. He counts ten for every year they have known each other. He counts Crowley’s feathers; he counts the barbs on each, flame-shriveled. He counts hairs across the nape of Crowley’s neck, counts the suddenly delicate-seeming scales, small and few with hurt and tension. Aziraphale counts and the light at the curtains’ edges fades and returns and fades again. When he has cataloged all he can, he starts over. The numbers are different: the feathers are inching back to wholeness. The thin black band along his spine widens. The smokewhite burns grow shallower. Across the bone-rounded curve of his shoulder, tiny matte speckles not quite copper, ash-smeared. Stardust, etched into him. Maybe once gold. Maybe as bright as titanium, once. 

Aziraphale brings his own fingertip to his mouth, presses it to his lips, touches it softer than soft to Crowley’s skin. Crowley’s ribs raise in breath. His feet look nearly better; on his shoulders, the black scales threaten to eclipse the galactic powder-burn. 

Aziraphale says, a whisper, “Go ahead. You’ll feel better,” and maybe hours pass again, maybe days, but Crowley slides into his snake-self and still he is in Aziraphale’s lap and still Aziraphale will not move. He will stay here forever if he needs to. He does not want a book; he does not want food; he wants Crowley, whole and hale and with him. 

He tries to trace his memories. What did he see. Should he have known. _Of course you should have known. Idiot._ How Crowley flexed his hand after they’d switched back, gingerly. How Crowley’s hand gripped the white-draped table. Earlier, when Aziraphale was being escorted from Hell—then, _then_:

Michael stepping with prim anxiety ahead, all the malevolent stump of Hastur behind Aziraphale, disguised, and Dagon sweeping at the tail. There, where the escalators meet in a lobby so jointly bland and horrifying neither side wants to claim it but nor will either side cede it, Sandalphon, rushing down, his gold teeth bared in a grimace. 

What Aziraphale wanted to do was look away, avoid notice, so close to escape. But Crowley would never do that. Crowley would stare right at Sandalphon—Sandalphon, who Crowley hates with a thoroughness Aziraphale thought was reserved only for Gabriel and instant coffee—eyes as hard as topazes. Crowley would lift his upper lip, show the white bone of his fangs. Aziraphale could feel them go a little longer in his mouth and could not tell if he’d willed it so, or if there was some instinctual vestige remaining of Crowley in this corporation. But Sandalphon was not even looking. Sandalphon was leaning over the escalator railing even as he descended, whispering to Michael: _Aziraphale, popping the bones of his neck, like a prize fighter, like bared fists and settling into a corner, waiting for the bell to sound. Aziraphale, with Hellfire in his lungs, breathing it out like a dragon._

In the moment, Aziraphale thought he might laugh. Might crow with it, with victory. All the sweat on Sandalphon’s cheek, the fearful stitches around his mouth. Michael’s head bent, hissing: _splashing, a rubber duck_. Victory. Of course Crowley did his with more flash. Aziraphale had only been proud then, so breathtakingly fond. Dagon caught his madcap grin in Crowley’s face and recoiled. Oh, it had felt so good. 

And this, its wages. If Aziraphale looks past Crowley’s skin, he sees the raw-rent of his throat, his lungs—not the corporation’s, but Crowley’s, which have only the shape of such things as throat and lungs because Crowley wills it so. Because this is how Crowley thinks of himself, even his snake-heart and snake-breath. The live-wire spark of him. Of course he was an angel, one of such great making.

The low black coil of him shifts, slightly. Aziraphale kisses his fingertip again and touches it to the crown of Crowley’s head, another near some little place where streetlight reflection catches a scale.

“Thank you,” Aziraphale says with no sound but this shift of his lips against the air. “I will not forget.” A snowflake falling makes less noise. “Thank you,” he says, as quiet as this midnight watch, and Crowley doesn’t argue with him. Crowley’s serpent chin stretches slowly, and Aziraphale inches down, until their heads rest together. 

***

Crowley, human-shaped, is knotted tight at Aziraphale’s side, not-touching save where hands clutch his elbow, where his forehead presses to Aziraphale’s bicep. He makes a shuddering sigh, starts to stretch, hisses hurt. 

“Gently.” Aziraphale says, “Can I help?” even though he has no idea how. Over and over, he wondered if he dared try to heal him, was afraid of what might happen. What worse.

“No,” Crowley says, but his fingers tangle again with Aziraphale’s. “Just—hold on.” Still he rasps. Aziraphale takes the directive literally, and Crowley lets him while he unknots himself, body stiff. Finally he lies back, splayed and bare beneath the blanket, and sighs, soft. Something in his spine pops. He touches his throat, winces again. Even his arms seem to ache. 

“May I draw you a bath? A little warm water might help.” His fingers snap, hidden.

Surprisingly, Crowley nods. His head lolls in the wrong direction. No door against the bedroom’s back wall. His chin tips, quizzically. 

“I’ve handled it. And I’m going to carry you. No arguing.” And then he is peeling back the blanket, sliding one arm slowly beneath Crowley’s, the other beneath his knees, and Crowley presses his cheek to the fabric of Aziraphale’s jacket, otherwise allows himself his limpness. He doesn’t argue. Aziraphale felt himself worried before. The worry deepens. 

Then Crowley whispers, “So fucking excessive, angel,” and musters the same groan he’d used the night after Armageddon when Aziraphale had complimented his plants. Because they’re right there, in the middle of them, the whole green-swathed room, the only real color in the flat. The only real light. And now there’s a large, deep clawfoot tub in the center of it, steam rising.

Aziraphale settles him into the water, rests Crowley’s head on the plush of a rolled towel, tucks another over his shoulders, so he stays warm. The sunken slits of Crowley’s eyes turn hard on the towering rubber plant and the kentia palm, the philodendron and the hibiscus and its white cigar of a flower, still yet to unfurl. _You_ Crowley’s mouth shapes at it, like he’s sneering, and his head turns to the woven bamboo, the dieffenbachia, the scheffleria. His whole face wrinkles at the bird of paradise, hinting at an orange and blue bloom to come. _Figures_, he hisses at them, and then his reproachful gaze lands on Aziraphale, whom he clearly suspects was _coddling_.

“I haven’t said a word to them.” He’s not lying, and he feels bad that he didn’t even think of the plants. He’s not even sure how long it’s been that they’ve been neglected. He says, “I didn’t leave the bed, didn’t touch them.” 

_You didn’t_— Crowley mouths. His wet hand heaves up to the rim of the bath, and Aziraphale covers it. And he sighs, and when he falls asleep again, he looks nearly content. It’s only when Aziraphale wakes him to lift him out again that Crowley seems awkward about his nakedness.

_You are beautiful_, Aziraphale emotes as best he can, but time and light lay other hurt bare: dark bruises on Crowley’s knees, the whole length of his shins—the effect of touching that earth through which Satan broke. So he stretches the towel larger, carries Crowley still so enveloped back to bed. 

“You can stay,” Crowley whispers. 

“Oh, I’m not leaving, not for anything. Just going to take care of a few things. I’ll be right here.” In the next room, Aziraphale means. So Crowley can rest. So Aziraphale will not be so tempted to touch the fading interlace of hurt. Aziraphale had made similar shapes before: darting hares and harts and hounds of ink, chasing themselves around holy texts and even some poems he knows now are lost to time and fire and forgetting. But the Hellfire resolves into nothing but pain; he knows that. Looking at those marks longer will not turn them into anything else, nothing past the temptation to press his mouth to them. To kiss away pain, if that were a thing he could do, and he does not think he can. Not yet. Not this pain. Maybe there is another pain between them to balm like that, but not now. Not like this. 

So when Crowley is again beneath his blankets, Aziraphale mills through these strange and nearly empty rooms. He picks up a stoneware bowl from the floor; he was the one to break it, so he mends it, replaces it. He’ll tell Crowley about it later. He runs his hand across a shelving unit that holds no books, only finely made objects: a piece of white marble as large as Aziraphale’s two fists carved with tufting hair and one wide eye and a rounded cheek. A cast-iron peacock feather. A little splay of gaming pieces that Aziraphale thinks are made of antler. A pair of dice. In his palm, Aziraphale feels their uneven weights, and he smiles. Why cheat with power when you can cheat honestly? He touches a whorl in the dark planking, and the flat face of one shelf slides away to reveal a very used-looking stereo, a few books Aziraphale recognizes as having been spirited away from his shop and some that are new to his eyes. The Christopher Smart. A fat volume on geology. A larger one on Alexander Hamilton, a book with a much-cracked spine and wrinkled covers. Like Crowley has thrown it. Aziraphale puts his hand on the book and he feels it—where Crowley has gripped, where the leverage pooled. He can imagine the place at the base of the wall where it struck, where the pages bent. But still the book is here, neat in its place on the shelf. Aziraphale turns to the stereo, to the CDs and cassettes and even 8-tracks in the drawer below. 

Among all the great masterpieces of the world, a bootlegged cassette labeled in a hand not Crowley’s. _London Calling._ The tape he must have carried in from the car those years ago, the night they took that snake back to her den near the Huntress statue. Songs Crowley still hums sometimes, like "Guns of Brixton." He’d done it the night they traded themselves. _His game is called surviving / As in Heaven, as in Hell_. Aziraphale remembers. He turns the volume to a bare thread of sound before he even pushes play, but he does push it. He listens. After the album plays once, after he waters the plants and thanks them for enduring under so much neglect—even as he wonders how they did it because their soil is dry as sand—he slips again into Crowley’s bed, the geology book in his hands. Crowley again shifts until his head rests on Aziraphale’s thigh, until his right arm binds them together.

***

Aziraphale blinks his eyes open to Crowley putting Crowley’s own mobile on Aziraphale’s chest. 

“Order food,” he says. “Wake me when it’s here.” He ducks back into the blanket-folds, covering even his head. 

Aziraphale takes a deep breath, takes the phone out into the main hall and, for the first time in what feels like a millennium, has absolute confidence in his subsequent actions. 

Crowley’s flat has a kitchen, austere and seemingly unused, but it does have a perfect, long sweep of quartz countertop, and within the hour, there is not a square centimeter bare. Crispy duck and dumplings steamed and fried, noodles and vegetables in four different sauces, chicken tikka and saag paneer and madras curry and garlic naan and cheesy naan, a small beef Wellington and coq au vin and a tartare that’s not exactly right but close, and a bag from Nando’s Aziraphale is simply going to put in Crowley’s lap. A punnet of champagne grapes, apples, blackberries as big as his thumbs. A lemon sponge, a spicebread, pots de crème. 

Before he even gets to the bedroom door, Crowley shuffles in, bundled in the overlarge dressing gown Aziraphale had left for him. Crowley breathes deep—as deeply as he can, before something pangs a little—but there’s still a soft and lazy grin at his mouth. 

“Knew I could count on you, angel.” 

Aziraphale steers him to a stool at the island that wasn’t there yesterday and puts a fragrant, frustrating bag in front of him. “Shut up and eat your peri-peri.” 

It’s only after they’ve eaten, after most of the containers are empty, after Crowley says he wants to at least sit up a little while longer, that Aziraphale asks what really happened. 

Crowley heaves a breath. “It was going to hurt. I knew it, but I know how to hide that. Problem was, I hadn’t banked on how much.” His hand waves. “Been a while, you know? So I put the part where it was actually burning me in my pocket.”

“Your—” 

“Where I did the thing.” His fingers make silent snaps, gesture upward. “With the boy. Where we were standing, that sand—now it’s like a lake of glass. But you know that, I suppose.” 

Aziraphale does know what happens when sand meets heat, yes, but—“You stashed Hellfire in a pocket universe.”

His hand runs through his hair. “I was hoping maybe I wouldn’t have to deal with it. Like it would dissipate on its own. But it’s Hell, and you have to meet it. You always do. That’s why the fuck it’s Hell.” His head thumps against the sofa cushion. “Perfect torment, and I do mean perfect. Because the very first thing you learn in Hell is to never let anyone think they’ve actually hurt you. But that’s pride, and pride’s one of the big ones. So whatever’s coming hurts more, and longer.”

“So you—went back and let it burn you properly?” And of course Crowley couldn’t just stand there in front of Gabriel and the rest. He had to breathe it in, breathe it out. _Because fuck ‘em._ A memory of Crowley in his ripped jeans and leather jacket, his mohawk. He’d always changed his look again, as soon as they exited the restaurant.

“The longer I waited, the worse it would be.” His hands gesture: exponential. “But you helped me—I didn’t—”

“The longer—Crowley! We spent _hours_—” Aziraphale clutches the trailing tail of the robe, wrings it like he’d maybe like to wring Crowley. “—nothing! We were talking about nothing!” Aziraphale had made a miniature macaron disappear, and then it had fallen from his sleeve onto Crowley’s shoe. They’d laughed. Over so much blessed nothing. 

“And I would be damned again before Hell took that away from me.” Crowley takes his hand, holds it hard, but he coughs, and Aziraphale can’t make himself ask any more questions. He hasn’t helped. He made it worse. 

***

The next morning, Aziraphale finds Crowley beside the front door, Crowley’s hand against the frame. He says, “This wall is cracked to the firmament.” 

“Stop it.” 

“I’m serious.” Crowley takes Aziraphale’s hand and puts it where the plaster is split, and though there’s a bright and upright force binding Crowley’s whole building, Aziraphale feels it: he has rent granite and earth, rooted the railroad spike of his affection and protection in the very bedrock. 

“Oh,” he says, and he mends the matter physical. The whole building clicks back onto its foundation, knits fast. “Apologies.”

With his free hand, Crowley thumbs the repair. “You didn’t have to—”

“I did.” Aziraphale cradles Crowley’s hand in his. “I did. I wanted to—and I would do it again.” _I would lance the heart of Heaven and Hell for you._ “It’s all I could do to help.” He wishes it was more. He has felt singularly useless so many times in the last month. 

Crowley’s face screws up a little. “You helped.” He slumps them onto the sofa again.

“I waited. I watched. I drew you a bath. I ordered takeway.” If he says _I held you_ he would have to say that was for both of them.

“No,” Crowley says. “I felt you. You were there.” His knuckles press against his chest. “You’re still _here_. That’s why I’m awake and it’s still this century.” 

Aziraphale shakes his head. “I wanted to try, but I was afraid—”

“I know what I felt. It was holy, a door I didn’t put there, a crack in it, drawing the fire out.” He turns his head away, the collar of his robe shifting. “Damnfool thing, angel. It shouldn’t have worked. You shouldn’t even have been able to find it. You might have been hurt,” he snaps. 

He wants to say, _it shouldn’t, it_ didn’t_, nothing I did has done anything but ruin the plaster, what the _Heaven_ are you on about?_, but he gets distracted by the bright glint of something, a speck on Crowley’s shoulder.

Glitter is his first thought. Glitter was a Crowley invention, and like most of the things Crowley earned the credit for, he regrets this one a bit. One of the neighbors sends him a Christmas card every year, and every year it’s one with sparkle affixed to the snow or the sky or whatever seasonal idyll there happens to be. And every year Crowley brings it to the bookstore to open and hide it somewhere. So there are stray bits in both their spaces, more in the bookshop because it _is_ Soho, after all. There will be stray bits of glitter. Aziraphale, had he thought about it, would have expected stray bits of glitter even after the Apocalypse. And now there’s one stuck at the tip of Crowley’s clavicle, where the little point of bone raises the skin. When Aziraphale reaches to brush it away, nothing comes free on his fingertip. Crowley goes altogether still. 

“What.”

“I don’t know.” Aziraphale’s hand hovers again. “May—” 

“What is it?” No matter the craning angle of Crowley’s still-aching neck, he doesn’t seem to see it, the tiny silver pinprick in his skin. All around it, the faded starstuff, enough like freckles no one would note. 

If he says he doesn’t know again, Crowley might shout, which will hurt his throat, and Aziraphale cannot allow that to happen, but he doesn’t know what he’s seeing. He thinks, for perhaps the first time in his life, he is not old enough to know what he’s seeing. So he quits seeing. He closes his eyes and sets his whole palm on the place. Crowley leans into it with his whole body, and Aziraphale leans into what he has touched with his entire soul. For a heartbeat, for an eternity, for the time it takes Crowley to say, _I need to know_, the only thing Aziraphale feels is _yes_. Yes, Crowley must know. Yes, Aziraphale must tell him. Yes, to Aziraphale’s every question he has been too afraid to ask. The _yes_ of it is like a beacon.

But where to start? How can he even begin?

He puts his hands back in his lap and watches Crowley’s face fall. He takes Crowley’s hand in his instead. “Did you have markings before? Angelic markings. Like Uriel’s. Like—”

“I know what they are,” Crowley snarls. Aziraphale swallows away the knowledge that Gabriel’s whole left pectoral is like a gilded platter. It’s the most gauche thing Aziraphale has seen, and Aziraphale remembers the greatest horrors of Rococo. Crowley thrusts the fabric back from the other shoulder, too, throws his left hand toward the freckle-scatter. “These.”

“And they were like—” 

“Light.” Crowley shudders. “Not gold. Like light.” 

Light, and then extinguishing. 

For all the hurt, all the slow-fading scar still weaving across him, now is when Aziraphale sees the tight pull across the bridge of Crowley’s nose, the pinch of his mouth, the refusal to let his eyes so much as dampen. 

“Crowley.” He presses the thin bones of Crowley’s hand between his own, then fits Crowley’s own hand to Crowley’s own skin and is there with his other arm to keep Crowley close when Crowley tries, it seems, to back out of himself altogether.

“What did you do?” he gasps, and Aziraphale can’t tell if it’s accusation or wonder. The words are torn, and his snake-spine twists and twists as much as it can, but not so far it takes him out of Aziraphale’s arms. 

“I didn’t do that. _I_ can’t do that.” 

“You did something like knock a whole building off its foundations while also pinning it to the heart of the planet—”

“That is an exaggeration and that is nothing like this.” Is the hammering pushing through both their palms two heartbeats clattering together? Is it photons? But that’s the stupidest thing Aziraphale has ever thought. It’s grace, ultraviolet, gravitational, undeniable. 

“Aziraphale, after the—time—I’ve had, I can’t—_don’t_—” Crowley’s left hand presses to Aziraphale’s, too. Whether it’s to feel what the other hand feels, or whether it’s to try to contain the tiny flare of incandescence—

“I’m not doing anything. I’m only holding you.” _You, all that you are, now and always, if you will let me._ There’s another wildness growing in him.

Crowley pants, the laughter tinging manic. “_Only_, the angel says to the demon.” But his other shoulder is tucked to Aziraphale’s chest, and his face follows, pressing into the side of Aziraphale’s throat, and Aziraphale slides a hand to the back of Crowley’s neck, steadies him. Crowley still presses on his own skin. Aziraphale leans, presses his lips to the back of Crowley’s knuckles.

“It’s not real,” Crowley is whispering. Crowley’s head is shaking, all of Crowley is shaking. “It’s not real. Why—why would—_why_—” And the litany becomes that word, that word alone, that word that charred his heels and his wings and cast him out from all those marvelous works of his hands.

_Because_ Aziraphale rings with all the bells of himself, because, because. Aziraphale, Principality, being of love, did not love this world She made, did not _appreciate_ the world She made half so well as this dark star in his arms. Surely that is enough _because_. But causality is dangerous. Aziraphale knows he cannot trust something as hypotenuse-direct as logic here. 

Another sound comes and Aziraphale knows it is not on this plane and it is not in his head but rather in Crowley’s—in Crowley’s thin-boned skull and in the scales that are hidden in him always and in the hollow shafts of his feathers and across a wide expanse of new-formed glass that has just shattered back to sand. 

Crowley does scream then, into the soft flesh of Aziraphale’s neck, and his fingers gouge into Aziraphale’s sides, and Aziraphale braces himself against the spear of light he has thrust into the firmament. He would prostrate himself but he would have to let go of Crowley and that he cannot do.

When the sound stops, Aziraphale cannot imagine it again, can’t call forth an echo into memory. But he remembers laughter, brighter than songs. He remembers _because fuck ‘em_ in a voice that does not belong to either of them, doesn’t belong to anyone he’s heard in six thousand years, and even then, it was just the once. He remembers the little snake, an offered pocket.

“Please,” Crowley says, gasping, “please, please, please never, ever do that to me again.” His head lolls on Aziraphale’s shoulder, his still-gold eyes, his still-slitted eyes, cast up. Does amusement flicker through the universe? Or is that only the way Crowley’s legs buckle beneath him when he tries to stand? 

Aziraphale catches him. That he can do. That he has done right.

The speck of light on Crowley’s skin has burst into a scattering, the whole constellation still fitting beneath Aziraphale’s palm, pulsing ancient fire, each light a different, shifting shade. The marks of Crowley’s hurt are gone—the bruises, the scent of char, all soothed or maybe holystoned away.

Aziraphale carries Crowley again to bed. What has happened has happened. How it’s possible, what it signifies, are questions impossible to answer now, and with the impossibility comes a certain kind of serenity. Aziraphale combs his fingers through Crowley’s hair, strokes the back of his neck. They knot themselves together, they hold fast. 

***

Sometime later, Aziraphale wakes to the weight of Crowley’s stare. It is no less formidable, no less staggering, no less tiger-lily beautiful. 

“What?” 

“Where’s yours?” He thumbs his starlight shoulder beneath the dressing gown. The touch is rough, casual-seeming, but Aziraphale sees the hold in his breath when he does it. The serpent sigil is still on his right cheek.

“Here.” Aziraphale taps the inside of his right arm, hidden beneath his shirt. It’s the kind of thing that was likely supposed to look imposing, another radiant flash before the flaming sword came down. 

“Can I see?” 

“Do you really—”

“Yes.”

The word comes so hard and sudden—yes, of course, Crowley does need to see. And all at once, Aziraphale feels like he needs to, too, which is new. He can’t remember the last time he _looked_ at his gold spangle. 

Aziraphale reaches for his cufflink so he can roll up the fabric and Crowley’s hands freeze on the buttons at his navel, where the white linen has come untucked.

“Sorry,” Crowley says and pulls back his hands. 

“No,” Aziraphale says. “Not at all.” He feels questions rising in his throat, different ones. They are answering things. Maybe it’s time to answer those, too. He moves his own hands to his throat. Crowley only manages to undo the bottom-most button before Aziraphale meets him, but Crowley sets aside the left cufflink, too. 

Crowley mutters _Another layer, really_ at the white vest beneath, and then blinks when Aziraphale yanks that off, too. 

Before Aziraphale can bring his arms down, Crowley’s holding his right elbow, his focus so entirely absorbed that Aziraphale can only look at his eyes, not at what they’re studying, until Crowley makes that startled, swallowed sound of his. 

There’s no gold spar. There’s a whorl, speckled silver-bright, and a gilded ring wrapping it. Behind it, all his pale flesh, caught in the strength of Crowley’s grip. 

It’s different, it’s so wildly different, so much so that Aziraphale can’t help the hum of panic rising in him, panic Crowley quells with palms hard on his bare shoulders. 

“Do it. Check.” _You’re all right_, the pressure says.

Aziraphale knows he’s right even before he does it, but he still opens all of his eyes into the blue ether, sees without sight the same divinity that has always filled him. A thing he can feel, that he knows he can feel, has not stopped feeling, but sometimes a thing is worth knowing every way you can. Because with Crowley so near—so near, all this time—he has to acknowledge that this is another feeling he has always known: its presence, its warm light. Yes, the room echoes, yes, and Aziraphale leans in, presses their mouths together. 

For a long time, nothing else happens but this: Aziraphale learns the way Crowley’s lower lip fits between his, how his own mouth yields to Crowley’s restive teeth, the soft sweep of a tongue. And then Aziraphale must sit up, must gather Crowley altogether to him. 

“Aziraphale,” Crowley whispers against his temple. His fingertips brush and curl at the nape of Aziraphale’s neck, over the slope of his back, and Aziraphale mirrors him, slips the robe down from Crowley’s shoulders. He presses kisses down Crowley’s throat, licks there because he squirms when it happens, because maybe there’s a breath of laughter in it. The tip of his nose touches the hollow of Crowley’s throat; he chases with lips and his tongue across the curving bone to taste these stars under which he has been navigating so long.

“I wanted you before,” Aziraphale says. “You must know. For so long.” He shouldn’t say it, now isn’t the time, and yet—“even without—” another kiss to his electrical skin—“I adore you. I will adore you.” _If tomorrow we wake and we are both stripped bare of all this._ If it is as Crowley had feared in the night, waking all sweat-slick and certain he’d been dreaming. _No dream. Ssh._

“I know,” Crowley says, “I know.” The teeth on the shell of his ear say _It was not you I doubted_. 

There is no doubting any of this. For nearly two thousand years, Aziraphale has imagined this moment, how fraught, how uncertain, how afraid he was. And yet now, it is the easiest and best thing in the world to let all their cloth fall away, to feel the shifting sleekness of Crowley’s spine, to slide palm and fingers along Crowley’s scaled arches and ankles and the warming skin above, to feel a soft and yielding heat against his thigh and an answering hardness against his own, to savor and celebrate all the places Crowley’s body—Crowley’s whole being—demands to be more than just one thing.

_You are a marvel, a miracle_, Aziraphale says with his mouth and his hands and the taut bow of himself. “Crowley,” he says, “dearest,” and he buries his hands in Crowley’s hair as Crowley buries Aziraphale in himself and buries the wave-crash cry in his mouth on Aziraphale’s bicep.

They’re so wrapped and rapt and singing in each other’s skin when reality tilts, when they tumble into a soft, impossible place with room enough for their wings all outspread, for the black singularity of Crowley’s pupils to be caught in all of Aziraphale’s. Here, they’re caught because they catch each other, because they cannot help but catch what they’re already holding.

***

The afterglow _does_. They lie half in Crowley’s rumpled bed and half in midnight ether, half under the dark-light tangle of their wings and half under dawnlight that carries in from the plants’ atrium, where the door stands open. 

“That’s too many halves,” Crowley says. 

“I think you’re allowed to have more than two if you want them. Especially you.” 

Crowley’s face on the pillow—beside Aziraphale’s face on the pillow—knots about the eyebrows. He drags Aziraphale’s hand to his face, to the edge of the serpent sigil. “What am I now?” 

“You’re Crowley.”

“But—” He heaves himself to his back. The little lights aren’t glowing now, aren’t shoving their luminescence out quite so hard, but it’s still like looking at a spray of mirror-dust. There is still, as Crowley described it, a door left ajar in him, somewhere, a door through which wisps wind and sound and Presence. Not like Before. Not like what Aziraphale has tried to describe in himself, a feeling so much more like that crashing sea in Galicia in infinite magnitude, and yet there is still as much feeling in him shaped like Crowley. The space in him keeps opening, keeps unfolding, fractal and unfractured. And now there is something, something that stands in the place Crowley had, only once, explained as a vacuum in himself. The effects of Falling. What else could there be in the absence of Her love but an infinite emptiness? _And nature abhors a vacuum_. Tries to thrust all it can into that yawning abyss, that which cannot be filled, and so Crowley would not let it. Would not allow himself to try to pull Aziraphale into that terrible emptiness. _Slipped up, sometimes. Put a lot of single-malt in it. Touches, sometimes. The shape of your hip on my palm. Songs. Some tepid cider and reed pipes._ But an abyss doesn’t have a door to leave ajar. An abyss has no starlight.

“You’re Crowley, and I’m Aziraphale, and we’re here, together.” In both of us, room for us. Built together. Built for them, together, maybe by other hands. It’s still difficult for Aziraphale to think about, to do anything more than be grateful.

“Yes, but—” Crowley tips up his chin to receive the offered kiss, and the next, and doesn’t say anything while Aziraphale breathes against the hollow behind his ear, while Aziraphale curves each of his sets of wings around Crowley and holds him close. 

Crowley shifts again, props himself over Aziraphale, his hands grounded in the mattress. More kisses. “You can’t just kiss me every time I’m being—”

“Impossible?”

“Interrogative.”

“Only sometimes, then.” Aziraphale slides fingertips along the line of scales, following their smooth slope. “I have an answer for you,” he says, “and you know what it is.” 

“If you say ‘ineffable’ to me in bed, I will not be held responsible.” 

So Aziraphale doesn’t say it. He strokes along Crowley’s back, and Crowley shifts all at once into his serpent form, now wholly in the bed, altogether in this plane. Aziraphale understands: this is to be sure he can still do it. Of course he has to know. Iridescence limns the scales of his throat, like oyster shells. There’s enough light to cast the shadow of Aziraphale’s arm while Crowley twines. His forked tongue flickers first against the air, then against the damp of Aziraphale’s hairline, and then against the metallic sheen on Aziraphale’s bicep. The muscle jumps; Crowley startles a little, like a static shock, and all at once he’s gangly bare limbs again. On his stomach, he tugs Aziraphale over onto him, and Aziraphale stretches his arms to cover Crowley’s, bracelets Crowley’s wrists with his fingers. He hums against the back of Crowley’s neck, rakes his fingers upward from nape to crown, until Crowley’s hair is a soft and stubborn crest.

Crowley makes an amused sound into the pillow, settles deeper into their warm strata. “You liked my hair like that, didn’t you.”

He doesn’t say it like a question and it isn’t. “I wanted to touch it so badly. Here,” he says, his fingertips skating wide, and suddenly his fingertips land as though in velvet. He stretches up, presses his whole cheek there, too. From this space of centimeters, he says, “I wanted to do this in Finisterre, too. I wanted—”

“Me, too. Everything, angel.” His chin rests on their hands together. “Only took us to the end of the world—twice—to find our way here. Wherever here is.” Crowley heaves another sigh and Aziraphale flexes his fingertips against Crowley’s delicately fuzzed scalp, where he leans like a cat.

“Here is where we are, I and thou.” Where they are, together. When pilgrims reach the saint’s tomb, when they’ve made their prayers and left their offerings and rested a time, they take up their walking sticks and keep on: to home, to the next shrine, to a place they never intended to come and yet still find themselves glad. For a blessing, for a friend, for love, for a sky so star-deep and luminous. Wherever the future takes them, whatever remains to be done, here is a good place to start.

**Author's Note:**

> [The Jeoffry section from Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45173/jubilate-agno)
> 
> ["Guns of Brixton"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiQoq-wqZxg) song & a video that isn't the official music video, but Crowley still very much approves of it.
> 
> [London Calling full album](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71Whp76GlX0), if by some chance you're here and haven't listened to The Clash.
> 
> [Jacqueline du Pre playing Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 in G, parts I & II](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MXP5QORUow). 
> 
> And if you want to know more about the people behind that little restaurant in Hampstead and the motorcycle accident, well, [here you go](https://archiveofourown.org/series/9540).


End file.
